Crap Days Out. Gareth Rubin

      STANTON DREW STONE CIRCLES

       SOMERSET

      Many thousands of visitors to Stonehenge in Wiltshire go to marvel at prehistory’s answer to the Millennium Dome and its surprising lack of size or inherent interest. Yet, astonishingly, few visitors are aware that in the nearby county of Somerset, Neolithic man built another, equally mysterious monument to disappointing bank holidays and unhappy children.

      The Stanton Drew stone circles are a group of big stones so uninteresting that they aren’t even on top of each other. That’s right. A bunch of big stones which don’t even merit the word ‘henge’.

      As if in apology for not having tried to balance a few on top of the others like those other guys did in Wiltshire, the Neolithic stone gatherers at Stanton Drew did, at least, offer an extra couple of circles for your visit. So it’s a bit like your plumber saying he hasn’t put in a bathroom as you wanted, but he has set up your DVD player instead and still wants paying.

      The larger of the two rings, some 113m in diameter, is called the Great Circle. As if Stanton Drew’s contribution to the putting stuff in circles community wasn’t quite poor enough, not all of the big lumps are even there. According to archaeologists, the Great Circle probably originally consisted of 30 or more stones, of which just 27 survive today, and was surrounded by a ditch, which is now filled in. So at some point, someone came and took away three massive stones. For God’s sake, why?

      An attraction that could scarcely be crapper if it was made of wood. Imagine that, eh? Woodhenge.

      WOODHENGE

       DURRINGTON, WILTSHIRE

      Just two miles to the north-east of Stonehenge, outside the village of Durrington, a monument exists that makes Stonehenge look like St Peter’s in Rome. That monument is Woodhenge. That’s right. Stonehenge on the cheap.

      Woodhenge was ‘saved’ from obscurity in 1925 by Alexander Keiller, an amateur archaeologist and the millionaire inheritor of the Keiller family’s Dundee Marmalade fortune, and his archaeologist friend OGS Crawford, who identified the site from an aerial photograph taken by a First World War air hero, Gilbert Stuart Martin Insall VC.

      Yet while those making the discovery might have a pleasingly Boy’s Own feel to their names, the site itself is far from King Solomon’s Mines. Apart from anything else, all the wood has gone. Stonehenge, only made of wood, and missing all the wood. All that remains are circles of holes which probably had big wooden staves in them. Or maybe not.

      Still, this was long before television, and Keiller and Crawford’s discovery led to a full-on, three-year-long excavation of the site led by Maud Cunnington, a fellow archaeologist whose parents can only have chosen her name from a Jeeves & Wooster story. Had she been asked, Cunnington would probably have said something like: ‘Woodhenge is a rich discovery of great historical interest that promises to significantly increase our knowledge of the pagan religious rites of Neolithic Britain, but I wouldn’t visit on a bank holiday if I were you. Why not go for a walk in the countryside and stop in at a friendly pub?’

      If you felt let down by Stonehenge or enraged by the Stanton Drew Stone Circles, Woodhenge will have you spitting blood.

      ABBOTSBURY SWANNERY

       DORSET

      Love swans? Then you will like the Abbotsbury Swannery. But if you don’t like swans, or only quite like swans, you probably won’t like it as much.

      SWIMMING WITH DOLPHINS

       NEWQUAY, CORNWALL

      Quite what the dolphins think of this whole farrago is anyone’s guess. It seems a bit presumptuous to decide they have nothing better to do than tow what are essentially land-based animals around in the water. They have mackerel to catch for one thing. They don’t expect us to give them a piggy-back around Coventry Cathedral if they fancy knocking about outside their natural environment. Just think how stupid you would look in a cathedral with a dolphin on your back. ‘What’s that, Jeff?’ ‘It’s a dolphin on my back.’ ‘Thought it was.’

      Swimming with dolphins makes as much sense as paddling with badgers or cooking with squirrels.

      Despite this, people seem to think if they just leap out of a motorboat waving their arms like nobody’s business and attempt to grab on to a passing sea-mammal’s fin, the little chap will turn, smile kindly and ask where he wants to go, like an unusually smooth and wet taxi driver. They think that after a quick dip with a bottle-nosed dolphin all their deep-seated psychological issues will drift away in a sea of calm. Not a chance, sunshine. The dolphin will do his very best to drown you and that won’t help you at all. It might well make things worse – nearly drowned by a dolphin, it doesn’t sound positive.

      Perhaps a clue that they are not 100 per cent behind the undertaking is the propensity of the squeaky hairless bastards to disappear as quickly as their fins will carry them at the first sight of some idiot in a wetsuit. And since there’s a fair-to-middling chance that if that dolphin does let you get close to it, it’s because it is actually a basking shark which could literally swallow you whole, you might just change your mind when you get close enough to realise just what you’ve done. Those stories you hear about dolphins protecting divers from shark attacks? Total propaganda. Any dolphin witnessing such an attack will do nothing but hang around on the sidelines watching and laughing as the stupid unwanted human gets what’s coming to him for messing about in shark-infested waters.

      There’s a clue in the word ‘infested’. Nothing ‘infested’ is nice. You don’t get ‘balloon-infested’ parties. No one describes a summer as ‘holiday-infested’. Sharks, they ‘infest’ like it’s going out of fashion. Stay away from them and their snide dolphin mates.

      And another thing, if dolphins are so clever how come:

      a) They keep swimming into tuna nets

      b) They haven’t invented anything. Not even spoons. Answer me that.